Liza
Do you feel it, too?
From the inside
In fragments
Voce
Andante con moto
Recovering the pain
Performances
Texts
Contact
Areas of specialization: existential philosophy; phenomenological philosophy; psychoanalysis; religion; music
Liza is a poet and philosopher, living in Jerusalem. Her work is a poetic evocation of the existential challenges of a meaningful life; she is interested in what it means to touch life and live it, in its physical struggle, honestly. She regularly teaches in literature, existential philosophy, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, religion, and music. Her first book originating in her dissertation, Recovering the Pain, considers what it means to say "yes" to life, physically, the pathetic difficulty, that is, of living, and her second, How We Are with One Another, considers what it takes to be human with one another. She holds a PhD in Rhetoric, with Designated Emphases in Critical Theory and Jewish Studies, from the University of California, Berkeley and is presently a Visiting Scholar at the Hebrew University.
Liza was born in Jerusalem, into a Jewish musical family,—her mother, a Russian pianist, her father, a Georgian violin-maker—the emotional inheritance by which she feels herself carried.
She composes in the religious and poetic register, fragments which reveal the parameter of duration in which life is felt.
What occurs "inside the writing" is significant: the structuring force of the feeling generated along the way matters and the feeling lived out from the inside matters. So, too, does the practical execution of the work carry significance. This is the mode, referring to the modus operandi of the bearer, which is tentative, from tentativus, "testing, trying.” Its poetry is not deliverance, but delivery, where the turbulence is rooted in беременность, difficulty in-gathering.
What does it mean to live in the deepest part of the experience? In her expression, Liza moves slowly toward touching the "lived-through," attending to the subtle, hidden contours of our lives. Departing from the ground of phenomenology, religion, psychoanalysis, Jewish ethics and esoteric theology, music, and performance, Liza grasps at difficulty, sincerity, intimacy, struggle, longing, starvation, and love; modes of significance that entangle a person most deeply in life. At the living tension, she writes for the difficult undemonstreable feeling inside, the weight of this essential pathos. She seeks a living engagement with existence, with another. Her expression is poetic and philosophical, opaque and tender, and necessarily emotional and existential.
Liza’s intellectual work goes beyond interpretation, it is itself a work of literature.